Providing motorists with information about potential railroad grade crossing delays facilitates the planning and selection of travel routes to avoid and/or to minimize travel time delays between origins and destinations where a railroad grade crossing may be impassable. This would reduce travel time, improve travel time reliability, and offer insight into traffic operations at blocked grade crossings. These benefits are directly applicable to emergency response services, municipal transportation services, and other road users, including the general public.
Emergency response services include fire, police, and paramedic services that typically are first responders to an incident and need to reach the locations of incidents as quickly as possible. These services generally have a central dispatching centre. Dispatchers at these centres then direct emergency response vehicles such as an ambulance, fire engine, police car or other emergency vehicle to selected locations and/or street addresses.
Most jurisdictions establish their own emergency response time parameters and minimum performance standards. These parameters typically comprise a maximum dispatch time and a maximum travel time to an emergency. The dispatch time is the elapsed time between a dispatcher receiving an alarm call and an emergency response facility (e.g., fire station) or field unit (e.g., police cruiser) receiving this call from the dispatcher. Best practices for processing alarm calls (dispatching) requires completion times of 60 seconds for 80% of calls and 106 seconds for 95% of calls. Emergency response units, specifically for a fire suppression incident, must meet a travel time requirement of 240 seconds for 90% of calls. Currently, dispatchers and emergency response units do not know a priori if a railroad grade crossing will be passable on their routes until they arrive at a crossing. When this event occurs, it results in the dispatcher calling a second unit to respond to the emergency event or, if possible, rerouting the first unit. Both responses to an impassable railroad grade crossing can result in unacceptable emergency response times that can lead to loss of life, increased seriousness of injuries and/or higher property damage costs.
Municipal transportation services are responsible for traffic operations within their jurisdiction. Traffic operations include facilitating the movement of people and goods through effective transportation networks, including operating public transit. Many large jurisdictions have, or are creating, traffic management centres to allow traffic engineers to respond to traffic conditions in real-time to reduce traffic congestion, respond to inclement driving conditions, or route vehicles around choke points, such as accidents.
PBX Engineering has developed a railway crossing information system (RCIS) along a rail corridor running through the City of Surrey and the City of Langley in British Columbia. This system is designed to alert motorists about train delays and provide traveler information to help reduce congestion and travel delays. At present, there is no emergency response component to this system.
The RCIS was initiated by Port Metro Vancouver to improve travel time for motorists, provide environmental benefits in terms of reduced vehicle emissions, increase infrastructure capacity, and establish transparency about rail activity to the community. The RCIS operates along a 4.4 km length corridor. There are four major at-grade crossings, seven train detector stations, nine motorist advisory signs, and a central control system. Train detectors provide data on train speed, direction, and length and are located off rail right-of-way. The RCIS includes a prediction algorithm to estimate the train arrival time at each crossing and the blockage duration. Train position is confirmed using mid-corridor train detectors and interconnected traffic signals where available. The system updates traveler information signs as the train progresses along the corridor. Each train detector station has four train detection radar units, one speed radar unit, three digital cameras, and a control cabinet. These stations can detect trains and determine their direction nearly 100% of the time and estimate train speed and length to about +/−3-9% accuracy.
The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has conducted research to monitor railroad movements in a corridor and provide train-related information to multiple agencies. They developed a prototype named RailTrac System which includes field, telecommunication, central processing, and user interface components.
The RailTrac System uses trackside Doppler radar sensors spaced between 1600 and 2600 metres apart to detect a train and measure its speed, direction, and length. These sensors can detect trains at a distance of up to 30 metres; however, they require access to infrastructure such as a pole for mounting, power, and telecommunications. Furthermore, they need to be mounted at least six metres above the train to minimize the detection of background movement which could falsely identify a train. Readings from the sensors are processed by an internal algorithm to identify and reject false signals and to estimate train length, position, and speed.
TTI also developed a Railroad Grade Crossing Monitoring System which examined how real-time detection, communication, and information systems can be integrated to monitor the movements of trains in a corridor to reduce conflicts and delays created by railroad grade crossings for the primary benefit of fire and police personnel. Specifically, this project conducted a pilot test for a 6.4 mile rail corridor in Sugar Land County in Texas. This rail corridor is operated by Union Pacific, averages more than 30 trains per day, and passes through two fire department districts.
The project developed a train monitoring system capable of detecting a train and determining its travel direction, speed, and length. It also monitored crossing gate closures using traffic signal information. The system integrates this data to estimate real-time train status and projects downstream crossing closures and clearance times.
The major difference between this system and the RailTrac System in the previous section is the information output process and interface. Whereas the RailTrac System provided tabular data, this system provides a graphical and map-based output. This map was displayed on a dedicated screen located within the police and fire station buildings.
Cisco is developing a management system for emergency response vehicles that is built upon the “Internet of Things” concept. The Internet of Things is a vision of connecting objects via wireless communication protocols such as wi-fi and 3G cellular networks. Cisco's application of the Internet of Things for emergency response vehicles involves deploying IP networks, routers, switches, and surveillance cameras across a city to monitor various elements of an emergency call. Their plan is to use GPS to track emergency vehicles in real-time and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication to allow emergency vehicles to communicate with traffic signals, rail crossings, traffic cameras, and roads.
Cisco's vision for their Connected Emergency Response and Public Safety initiative is extensive and complex and involves much more than intelligently routing emergency vehicles to avoid delays at train crossings. It also involves monitoring tire pressure and oil levels of vehicles, transmitting data via the cloud regarding the location of fire hydrants and characteristics of the emergency scene, altering traffic signals across a road network to accommodate various emergency response vehicles from across the city, and sending data wirelessly to fire, police, nearby hospitals, and hazardous material dispatchers to help prepare other first responders and medical personnel.
Clearly, a system that would provide individuals, for example, a dispatcher, with information regarding the closure of railroad grade crossings as early as possible would have several benefits, for example, reducing the risk of an emergency response vehicle encountering an unexpected delay as a result of an impassable railroad grade crossing. Specifically, such a system would enable dispatchers to select the appropriate emergency response facility and/or travel route to avoid or minimize delays caused by blocked grade crossings.